Good morning and good to you,

Doc

Berry Pickin’

It’ll soon be time for picking blackberries back home in West Kentucky, I reckon. One of my favorite rituals when I was growing up on our Todd County farm back in the Fifties and Sixties was doing that with my mom.

Berry picking was the only time I ever saw her wear pants or britches. Whether to save scratches or itches, I don’t know. Maybe it was both. Like many Southern farm women of the Fifties, perhaps most especially those who were married to fundamentalist preachers as she was, Mom never wore slacks. Even after pant suits became popular in the Sixties, Mom never abased herself in such fashion. Nor in the Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties. Or in her seventies, eighties, or nineties. She thought it just wasn’t proper. But she did wear pants to go blackberry picking.  

Before we’d head out in the days long before Off! and such luxuries became available to the good country folk of West Kentucky, clothing was our only protection. Chiggers, briars, ticks, and mosquitoes had open buffet on any exposed skin. Or, with chiggers and ticks, unexposed skin as well. In fact, for chiggers, the more hidden and private the areas, the more they seemed determined to take up lodging.

Our only defense was to wear long pants and long sleeves for the picking and then take a hot soapy bath as soon as we got back to the house. Thus, Mom slipping into the bedroom and pulling on a pair of Dad’s clean khaki workpants underneath her dress. She also put on a sun bonnet to keep her face from getting sunburned while we worked around the blackberry patches.

It was amazing to watch her work her way through the patch. She’d push or pull the vines away, parting something of a path. Then, she’d gather her dress tightly around her and ease her way through, using the metal bucket to ward off some of the vines. I was less than half her size and wore jeans and got tangled up more than she did. I reckon it just shows that even something as “simple” as picking blackberries can give wisdom a chance to show itself.

It was a rare thing for Mom to “ignore” the demands of church and culture in a time when “wearing men’s clothes” was strictly forbidden. But it was, I think, a grand lesson in recognizing that exposing herself to needless wounds a half-mile away from any neighbors and hidden in a blackberry thicket was needless devotion to traditional interpretations that ignored the welfare of those for whom the teachings were intended. If David could eat the shewbread in the temple, then she could surely protect herself from thorns and briars while gathering food for her family.

It was maybe the most visible and memorable demonstration I saw growing up that “The Sabbath was made for man; not man for the Sabbath.” It seems like people are still forgetting that. Or, maybe… just ignoring it whenever they’re more interested in judging others than in their own obedience.

H. Arnett